Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 08, 2010 @09:35PM
from the get-one-give-me-one dept.

angry tapir writes "One Laptop Per Child has revealed it is adding a multitouch screen to the upcoming XO-1.75 laptop and is modifying software to take advantage of the new hardware. The XO-1.75 with a touch-sensitive 8.9-inch screen will start shipping next year. The laptop will run on an Arm processor and is the successor to the current XO-1.5 laptop, which runs on a Via x86 processor. OLPC will also add a multitouch screen on the next-generation XO-3 tablet, which is due to ship in 2012. Fedora will continue to be the base Linux distribution for XO-1.75 as the laptop changes from the x86 to Arm architecture."

The one thing with multi-touch is the possibility of patents interfering with the ability to use it. While this might not be a problem for some OSS projects or large companies with the ability to add in a few dollars to the price to pay for patent fees, I can see this being an issue for something as cost-conscious as the OLPC's laptop because even an extra $5 could make a huge difference.

I would assume that, barring their securing super-cheap/free licenses for themselves on the "well, these are designed for poor kids who can't afford to buy our actual products, so why not score ourselves a tax writeoff?" principle, the OLPC people would just include the hardware and basic software support(to the best of my knowledge, "X11 that can see more than one pointer at a time, based on a touchscreen" is safe "All the little refinements that make using an iPhone nice" is a patent minefield).

Steve Jobs at one point offered to donate MacOSX licenses for every OLPC

I'd love to get a reliable source on that. I always imagine Apple as being evil as sin (ha!); it would do a lot for my impression of the company to believe that they were willing to work on something for nothing (OS X + PostScript GUI on a 433mhz Geode?).

Nearest source I could find was here [olpcnews.com] (which, in turn, cites this [reuters.com], but I can't find the quote on Reuters, so whatever.):

Steve Jobs, Apple Computer Inc.'s chief executive, offered to provide free copies of the company's operating system, OS X, for the machine, according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative's founders. "We declined because it's not open source," says Dr. Papert, noting the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

I'd love to get a reliable source on that. I always imagine Apple as being evil as sin (ha!); it would do a lot for my impression of the company to believe that they were willing to work on something for nothing (OS X + PostScript GUI on a 433mhz Geode?).

Steve Jobs, Apple Computer Inc.'s chief executive, offered to provide free copies of the company's operating system, OS X, for the machine, according to Seymour Papert, a professor emeritus at MIT who is one of the initiative's founders. "We declined because it's not open source," says Dr. Papert, noting the designers want an operating system that can be tinkered with. An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

As for OS X on a 433MHz X86 compatible - "OS X" seems to run just fine on an iPhone/iPod Touch which have 400MHz ARM processors. Sure it's not the full OS, but it can be cut down to run decently. I think OLPC could've cut out the fat and made it run decently...

OLPC would not be able to cut out the fat and make OSX run decently due to its proprietary nature. Presumably, OLPC chose OSS for the ability to modify the OS to conform to their systems' capabilities, which would simply not be possible on OSX.
I'm intensely skeptical of the idea that Steve Jobs would ever offer to license OSX to run on hardware that they did not control.

Maybe any offer was based on the knowledge that the answer would be no for the reasons you state - it does a company no harm to make a generous offer to a charitable cause when they know they'll never have to go through with their part of the deal...

> OLPC would not be able to cut out the fat and make OSX run decently due to its proprietary nature

Bullshit. In the first place, yes that is the full OS X in iPhone and iPad and iPod touch. The only difference between Mac OS and iOS is the user and application interfaces. One is mouse and one is multitouch. The bottom 3/4 are the same. The xnu kernel runs on iPod and Xserve and everything in-between. Yes it runs great on ARM 400MHz with 128MB of RAM. It ran great on PowerPC G4 500MHz. Secondly, the core of OS X is open source. OLPC could easily see what is going on there. Third, OLPC uses fucking Windows. They shipped fucking Windows. That is fat and proprietary. So the idealistic notion of Sugar is just an idealistic notion. By any measure, free OS X is better than cheap Windows.

Yup, Os X could easily have run on the chips. Desktop OS X ran quite happily on 433MHz PowerPC chips, and a cut-down version would not have had problems on a mobile version (same kernel, trim some of the userspace stuff).

They did not, as you assert, ship Windows. They made sure that the hardware worked with Windows, because some customers wanted it, but they ship Linux. They just don't prevent you from installing Windows. Sugar is cross-platform and can run under Windows, but OLCP uses it under Linux.

The decision to use a fully open stack was both idealistic and pragmatic. One of the requirements of the OLPC project was that they should not be the only supplier. It was intended to help bootstrap a technological industry in the countries that opted in, and one of the stages in this was that they should be able to take over production of the units themselves. The specifications and software stack for the entire unit are available royalty free, so any country with the required manufacturing capability can modify the system in any way that they want, based on their own usage requirements, and start producing the newer versions (or get some foreign company to do the bits that they can't do locally yet).

Bullshit. In the first place, yes that is the full OS X in iPhone and iPad and iPod touch.

Not this myth again. No it isn't. They run the same kernel. OS X is more than a kernel, unless you want to claim that OS X is open source.

And the point still stands. Okay, it's possible for Apple to modify "OS X" and get it to run on low powered devices like the Ipad, but the point is that OLPC couldn't do that. If you mean they could build something on Darwin - sure, but that's clearly not what the conversation was ab

As for OS X on a 433MHz X86 compatible - "OS X" seems to run just fine on an iPhone/iPod Touch which have 400MHz ARM processors. Sure it's not the full OS, but it can be cut down to run decently. I think OLPC could've cut out the fat and made it run decently..

I beg to differ. iOS4 runs like crap on the original iPhone and iPhone 3G. And previous versions didn't run all that smoothly. Things do seem to run much better on the iPhone 3Gs and 4, which run at 600 and 800 MHz respectively.

Well, there are varying degrees of evil and varying degrees of sin, but Apple, like any other corporation, has no morals. They exist ony to make a profit. The only companies that have any morals are privately owned ones, and these companies' morals match their owners. The peanut factory that poisoned all those people last year and caused grief for so many other companies they supplied was privately owned; its owner went to prison iinm. Its morals matched its owner

If Microsoft was offering to give away "free" licences, there'd be no end of criticism from people saying how this was simply in Microsoft's interest in that they'd get everyone using Windows and Windows software, which the recipients would later have to pay for when they want to upgrade.

The 100 dollar quote was good to get attention, but everybody got it wrong. They said they would get to 100 dollars after reaching significant volumes. They didn't.

Then, there's the dollar devaluation.In Uruguay, from our point of view, it wasn't that expensive. The original 100 dollars, at 26 pesos per dollar, meant 2600 pesos when they said it. When they shipped a hundred thousand laptops, the price was 175 dollars, but at the exchange rate of 20 pesos per dollar, it was 3500

This is one of the nice things about resistive touch screens - you can have the advantage of touch, but you can also use a stylus to avoid smearing marks over your screen (as well as the advantages of extra precision when needed, and the screens also work with gloves etc). Capacitive touch is nice for my bedsite lamp, but for a phone/computer, I'd rather have something more practical.

I've yet to come across a case where I wished I had multitouch. One mouse button is simpler, remember? It's only getting hype

Depends on how you measure success. It achieved a lot more than not doing it would have achieved. It achieved a lot less than their goals. With a project like this, I don't think you can really measure its success meaningfully in any time period shorter than a decade, and probably two.

The whole point of OLPC was to provide internet access, textbook e-reading, paperless word processing, and some joy, to impoverished children, in a form that is both durable and affordable to charities and 3rd world government schemes. How does multi-touch help with any of that again?

It sounds like it's just going to drive the price up, add an extra point of failure, and add a feature that even 99% of "1st world" consumer products hasn't bothered with.

If you've actually gotten your hands on an OLPC XO unit, when it's rotated into e-reader tablet mode with the keyboard hidden, it ***NEEDS*** a touchscreen since the corner keypad & navigation buttons (mapped to cursor keys, pgup, pgdn, home, end) become useless when you need to do some mouse moving & clicking.

It's just very natural given its design.

Next, in terms of apps that can be developed, a whole new world opens once you shift to multi-touch as opposed to single-touch screens (piano

Multitouch is cheaper than mouse, and more useful to kids. Not just because they live in the 21st century, but because young kids can handle touch better than mouse. The mouse hardware may be cheaper, but it requires much more complicated software which makes mouse more expensive. And the Web works better with touch. Painting is better with touch. With touch you can emulate many real devices.

But then again, OLPC is about serving the philanthropic needs of adults, not the practical needs of kids. So a mouse

The mouse hardware may be cheaper, but it requires much more complicated software which makes mouse more expensive.

What are you smoking, and can i have some? Mouse hard/software is incredibly generic and simple, if this machine runs software based even losely on any OS used in the past 15 years, it will have built-in mouse support.

As for the ipod touch comment, i dont know if you have one, but it just doesnt work for anything serious. It's ok for casual browsing or even short forum posts, but for anything more then a one-liner i would much prefer even my cramped 7" netbook. the ipod would be fine for the kids to reads n

No. The OLPC project took a lot of flack from the uninformed over the decision to make the entire stack open source, but this is one of the reasons. The project only has to focus on the new design, because anyone can make the old design due to its open nature. I was at a talk a couple of years ago by Alan Kay, who said that the nice thing about being a non-profit is that they want people to steal their ideas. If a country wants to have a few million of XO-1 laptops, they have the designs. If they have the manufacturing capability, they can build them themselves. If they don't, they can send the designs to a factory in India or China to do it. If they have the required local talent, they can tweak the designs and improve them.

One of the goals of the OLPC project is that it should become self sustaining. They want future generations of the laptops to be designed and built by people who learned about the technology from playing with the earlier generations.

Just because hardware doubles in speed / capacity for a given price point every few years, sadly does not mean that the price halves for a given speed / capacity. It would probably cost the same today to build a 500 MB hard drive as it would to make a 5 GB one. There are just baseline manufacturing costs that don't really care about technological sophistication or a lack thereof.

The XO-3 [blorge.com] looks like a proper jump in that direction: no keyboard, no folding screens, no rabbit-eared Wifi... all of the baselin

Seriously, no 3D? How are they expected to use these things without 3D?

If they really want to add something of value, add 3D and include a set of 3D glasses, it's clear this is where the future is headed. The writing is on the wall for 2D, OLPC needs to get with the times.

One thing that amazes me is how persistent Nicholas Negroponte is. Despite having setbacks, scandals, poor reception of his devices, countries renouncing their support of his project, and as far as I can tell no real success, he still keeps on coming. I don't know if he will accomplish anything with this next model, but if there is anything at all that can be accomplished by giving children one laptop each, this man will accomplish it.

They can't normally be bought except in large government-level quantities, but if you want to get your hands on one for testing, you can apply for the contributors' program. Basically you submit a project proposal on how you're going to use the units, and it's kinda like a grant except they send you laptop units.

You can volunteer as a developer and if you submit a good project proposal, there's a good chance of being sent some units.

For a long time, I have wanted a tablet like device which I can write/draw on, and use with pen-optimized input systems like ShapeWriter or HexInput. (Though ideally, I would like to write one myself...)

Is there any such hardware? As far as I am aware, it should be possible to offer multitouch and a stylus in the same device. The lack of both makes such devices much less compelling.

Why not just give these kids cheap desktops? You can get a decent computer, likely more powerful than that OLPC, from Dell for maybe $200-$300. It doesn't have to be from Dell. I'm sure most of these nations have computer vendors assembling machines from low-cost Chinese components. Set up a deal with Microsoft for cheap copies of Windows, although I'm sure there are already these kinds of programs in place. I realize that the idea of running Windows on these machines is offensive to some, but the fact is t

There are a lot of places that have clean water and enough food, but lack ways of getting ahead, lack good educations, etc. The internet and computers can change that and help train people to actually use technology and get ahead.

Somebody very close to me did a stiny in a fairly well-known (not religious) organization that travels around the world and teaches poor civilizations self-sufficiency, also helping them modernize their businesses and agriculture.

She went in an altruistic, bleeding-heart hippie ready to give it her all. She came out with strong anti-immigrant sentiments, resentful that the people she had worked so hard to help just kept asking for handouts instead of making any effort to better themselves. She lamented that the current soft approach was, "treating the symptoms, and not the illness."

...Ok, so what do -you- think we should be sending the third world? $999 Macbooks? $300 Celeron 900 cheap laptops? A $1,200 Core i7 notebook?

The OLPC makes -sense- because it is A) Cheap, B) Very readable in sunlight C) Is Linux-Based and puts a high priority on development and D) Has decent-ish specs.

Think of your first computer. Chances are, unless you were relatively wealthy when you got your first PC, it was a generic, low-end system, sometimes not even a compatible model to what was the "standard" of the time. For me, it was a Commodore 64 way after its prime and way after IBM-compatible systems were the standard. It taught me BASIC and the fundamentals of programming and computer use, could I get a job just by knowing that Commodore 64? No, but it set the foundation to make learning MS-DOS, Windows and later *Nix very easy.

E) Durable as hell. I challenge anyone to find a $200 netbook that is waterproof, let alone one that can be dropped from 7 or 8 feet repeatedly without worrying about if it will survive. F) Grid networking. Instead of crowding around a single access point that might not be in reach, a school full of OLPC's can piggyback on eachother's signals to get much further than otherwise possible.

And let's not forget that the XO project is partially responsible for the existence of netbooks. Intel and Microsoft both made reference netbook platforms in response to the perceived threat of OLPC platform. (politics, someone else can jump in with the sordid history, I'm sure). Basically, when it was announced a $100 (cough $200) laptop was considered ludicrous, and a lot of effort went into making viable platforms. Now, netbooks are almost an impulse buy.

The keyboard's pretty terrible, but other than that the OLPC is a surprisingly well designed platform for the environment it finds itself in.

F) Grid networking. Instead of crowding around a single access point that might not be in reach, a school full of OLPC's can piggyback on eachother's signals to get much further than otherwise possible.

Isnt this pretty much a software/firmware feature? i doubt that the OLPC has some really special hardware inside to make this work..

But yeah, the OLPC is pretty much a rugedized netbook, putting normal netbooks in the same environment wouldnt work well

This should not be underestimated. If you haven't actually had the opportunity to play with an OLPC you may not understand how remarkably rugged they are. Yes they are a little heavy compared to nice slim laptops, but they are very solidly built and can take quite a beating without worry. The fact that they are waterproof and lack moving parts (hence less damage from falls etc.) is just icing.

.Ok, so what do -you- think we should be sending the third world? $999 Macbooks? $300 Celeron 900 cheap laptops? A $1,200 Core i7 notebook?

*puts on flame retardant suit*

Honestly? I think we should send the third world some papers explaining why their constant violence and lack of everyone being held accountable by the law keeps them from being able to move up, no matter how much technology they get.

If they just cut the constant violence and crime, companies would start building factories there and would start bringing technology with them. No sane company is going to build a new factory in the middle of a war zone.

So what benefit did that really have on your knowledge of computers? The OLPC isn't designed to be an expensive top of the line computer because how many do you think we could send? For the cheapest "standard" laptop you can buy which is around $300, you could send 2, perhaps 3 OLPCs to the third world. Did you go out and buy a Ferrari for your first car too?

Also, sending high-priced items to developing countries for cheap or free is really really really tempting fate as far as graft and corruption are concerned.

Imagine a whole bunch of $1000 laptops are given away free, or even for $250 to the third world, thanks to generous donations and so on. Then mysteriously, a bunch of laptops, each worth $1000, show up on ebay for $750, and certainly unrelatedly, a whole bunch of sub-$500 laptops actually get to the intended audience. Must have been a mixup in shipping. Pay no attention to the man buying the golden toilets.

And like you say, what's the improvement? There's not a whole lot more you can do with a performance computer when you haven't yet learned to use computers. You don't need to lend them your Ferrari so they can learn to drive, either. It's common sense.

Exactly, and further on the point of improvement, I know for me the greatest learning experiences I have had is when technology didn't work out as planned. A screwed up update taught me how to restore a broken bootloader, a broken HDD taught me how to use unconventional methods to recover needed data (and to back up more frequently...) and problems with my wireless router taught me how to use DD-WRT and to configure various settings to help eliminate those problems.

Unless of course the school administrator is paid to look the other way or even register unauthorised devices, or fake schools are set up just to acquire these devices. That's leaving aside any technical solutions involving hacking the hardware.

The most sophisticated lock-down cannot work around human corruption - at some point in the chain you have to have people you trust. It's a game of cat and mouse with 1 cat and 10,000 mice.

That's not to say that XOs are not a good idea, but we should be realistic abo

Your parents were wealthy if they could afford a top of the line system. Being able to spend that much on anything nonessential to survival puts you easily into the top 10% of the world's population by wealth, and probably into the top 5%. The OLPC system is aimed at far less wealthy people than your parents.

One of the people who's just become involved with an open source project that I run is in India. His parents' annual income is only slightly more than the cost of my laptop. He is using a 300MHz Celeron, which he managed to scrounge, and it's the fastest machine that he has access to. It has 64MB of RAM, so nontrivial compile jobs cause a lot of swapping. His Internet connection is heavily metered, so he can only download things in the middle of the night (when it's off-peak time). He is the sort of person that this project is aimed at.

The first computer that I learned to use was a BBC Model B. This had a 2MHz 8-bit CPU and 32KB of RAM, in a time when a typical PC had a 12MHz 286 and 1MB of RAM. The first computer that I owned was scrounged from my father's workplace and was an 8MHz (16-bit) 8086 clone, with 640KB of RAM running MS DOS and Windows 3.0, in a time when my father's laptop was a 126Hz (32-bit) 386 with 5MB of RAM.

Now, most of the work I do is on Mac OS X, FreeBSD, or Solaris. How much do you think I learned on a BBC or a DOS PC that is directly relevant to those platforms? A lot. Both had easily accessible developer tools.

The BBC booted directly into a dialect of BASIC that supported structured programming, direct interfacing with the hardware (for controlling robots and suchlike via the array of easy-to-use I/O ports it had) and even had things like a built-in assembler. For the PC, I had a PL/M compiler, which taught me about low-level programming and made it easy for me to learn C (I later got a C compiler for the machine, but C feels painfully primitive as a low-level language in comparison to PL/M). When I got a 386 (my father's old laptop, when he got a 486), it ran Windows 3.11 and have Visual C++ 2.0 installed.

By the time I arrived at university, I was already moderately competent in about a dozen programming languages. This would probably not have been the case if my first computer experience had not been with something like the BBC, where programming was the easiest thing to do. That is the point of the OLPC. The user is able to modify absolutely any part of the software stack, and is encouraged to do so. Do you really think they'd be better off with machines that functioned as appliances and didn't encourage understanding?

His parents' annual income is only slightly more than the cost of my laptop.

You have to remember that prices for most essentials (esp food & shelter) would be far lower than where you live as well. When I was stationed in Thailand in 1974 the average taxi driver made ~$1k/yr, but you could feed four in a nice restaraunt for under a dollar, take a cab anywhere in the country for $3, or a bus to anywhere for a nickle. The bungalow I rented cost $30 a month.

These are far more advanced than my first several computers. They are certainly not toys. If you are referring to the user interface decisions that are geared towards making the system more child friendly, then all I can suggest is that they are trying to make learning more fun. Not necessarily a bad idea. The machines are still capable of doing all of using productivity applications that are needed in a non-toy computer.

I (wildly) wonder how much of that is really needed. My first computer had MSX-BASIC and a programmers manual. It took quite some figuring out how even to start a game. It took even more guts on trying to make or hack a game. It made one heck of a learning experience. Then again, I was pretty much set on understanding computers, not so much as doing anything useful with it.

PS. And Dijkstra is wrong, you can start off by learning BASIC and become a good programmer:) Then again, MSX-BASIC probably was one of

"General" education isn't always needed in the third world, skills however are. Who cares if you can read Virgil in Latin, know all of the kings of England and have the periodic table memorized. However, if you can download a diagram of how to build a simple well and treat the water, that is useful. If you can find organic fertilizers that work to make the crop harvest better. If you can figure out more efficient ways of building huts, learn science to contradict harmful superstitious beliefs of your tribe,

Communication is also very important. I know a lot of people in developing nations who can't afford to talk on phones, but have large communities of people and resources they reach over email. These help them develop their businesses, get visas to travel abroad, etc.

So Cuba is a Second World Country, just like North Korea, Vietnam? West Germany was a First World Country, while East Germany was a Second World country?
Where would you classify Switzerland (which was the definition of neutrality in the last couple of hundreds of years, if not more?) Also a Third World country?

It's easy to say that when your only experience is of a western education. Why don't you come to a third world country and see for yourself. The teachers don't know the subjects they're teaching, they can't get good teachers because no one wants to live there, the students books are all different in the class room because they are all donations.

Spending money of computers as reading devices IS the right decision here. It allows everyone to share the same material, it allows media to be played so kids can learn new languages even if the teacher doesn't know himself.

"One library of text books per child" might have been a good idea for a project too, but guess which one seemed more expensive.

If you seriously want to improve education in third world countries there are only so many things you can do. Providing internet- (and thus "all the knowledge in the world")- accessing devices with a full productivity environment built in seems like as good an approach as any. Unless you have a secret stash of trained teachers (will travel) or are the owner of a stationary factory w

I live in Thailand and there are plenty of kids here who could use these things. Upcountry get a lot of donated books for example in learning english, that's great except they're all different books so learning in the classroom is extremely difficult. Also no one wants to teach there because it's in the middle of no where.

Giving kids a computer with ebooks that have all the same material and/or can speak out english to help them pronounce better would be a huge win. Even cost isn't an issue, the Thai government has already wasted billions on useless thrown away ID cards, this would be a drop in the ocean.

Can't say that the experience in my country has been a wild success, but still things has changed since most school children here in Uruguay got their XO, and not just for the children.

And if well it went for children for most social classes (they were deployed in all public schools, so some private schools didnt got them) somewhat chokes you to see poor children on the streets playing with them or browsing internet close to places with free wifi.

It is the good teachers part that is hard. Just think about when you were in high school in a first-world country, how many of the teachers were actually good? How many actually knew much about the subject they were teaching. Now, if we can't even get good teachers in the first world for competitive pay and those teachers are highly educated, then how do you expect the third world to get good, accurate, and native teachers? With the internet, even though a teacher might not be an expert at some subject, the teacher -can- connect to experts and show their students it on their own laptop. Some things can't just be explained with pen and paper, for example, how would one explain the sound of an electric guitar to someone who has never heard it? Videos and the like are very good tools to cater to the uneducated masses, after all one only needs to look at the first world to see that. Books are also very expensive for what you get. The internet is nearly limitless when it comes to scale, if someone really wants to study something like Macroeconomics, you aren't going to get a good book that can walk someone through all stages of expertise from an introduction to advanced studies, but with the internet it is easy.

Each student is different and even the best first-world teachers aren't experts in everything, the internet lets them connect to experts to teach things beyond what they ordinarily could.

Do you have any idea how expensive books, paper, and pencils are? My mother taught in schools in the UK, and they could barely afford the books, paper, and pencils that they needed. Teachers are even more expensive.

Yes, it would be great to be able to give these people all of that stuff. It would also be great to give them fibre-optic broadband, nuclear power plants, stable electricity and water grids, and so on. It's not even remotely economically feasible. The point of OLPC is not to give them the best possible help, it's to give them the best affordable help, and hopefully help them get into a position where they can give themselves the best possible help in a generation's time.